“Joe really didn’t want me to do it at the time — you know, wearing a bikini thong and struttin’ your stuff on stage. So now he wasn’t here, I’m like, I’m doing what I want when I want, so I decided to do it,” she says. “And he was really supportive of it.”

The workouts and meal prepping wasn’t easy, Giudice says, but she was determined.

“I just put my mind to it,” she says. “And I also wanted to show my daughters, you know, if you put your mind to something you could achieve it.”

Giudice started training for the competition in December, seven months before she would hit the stage. She ended up having a great day, and placed third in the 40-plus bikini division at the NPC South Jersey Bodybuilding Championships.

“She wanted a new challenge and pushed herself to the extreme,” a source told PEOPLE in June. “Right now she is in the best shape of her life.”

“She has lost a bunch of weight,” the source continued, and Giudice is “even more fit than when she got home [from prison].”